


This Very Moment

by theskywasblue



Category: Saiyuki, Saiyuki Gaiden
Genre: Childhood, Flashback, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2010-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:29:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskywasblue/pseuds/theskywasblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four short glimpses into the past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Very Moment

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "Seeds". Time taken to write: 34 minutes.

Koumyou prefers autumn, really, as the seasons go. The sky is so bright then, so very perfectly blue. The perfect contrast with orange paper or orange leaves. But spring has its merits, a time of growing, a time of renewal, endless hope.

He holds Kouryuu's hand as the toddler tromps through the puddles in the temple courtyard, his cherubic face etched with intense concentration; the tiny boy brings his foot down with a slap into each puddle, as if trying to destroy his own reflection, and the water splashes the hem of Koumyou's robes. It seems to frustrate Kouryuu that he cannot banish his image or keep it from looking back at him.

"Kouryuu..." Koumyou says finally, patient but amused, "You cannot change the way the puddles lay."

"I will," Kouryuu answers, pulling his hand free and splashing away. Koumyou watches and thinks about all the things and grow and change in the spring.

***

At the orphanage on the first day of spring the children are ecstatic, they can hardly be contained humanely within the stone walls, and so the sisters shepherd them outside, into the sunlight and onto the wet grass, where they quickly shed their proper outdoor clothing in a fit of joy and are utterly uncontrollable until the fresh air exhausts them just in time for mass.

The new boy is different. He stands beneath the budding branches of the trees with his head down, dark hair falling over his eyes, and will not be coaxed into play. One girl attempts, and though he seems not to move, or even to breathe in her presence, she comes away weeping.

"He will come around," the Mother Superior tells them all gently, "He just misses his family. You cannot rush him; only coax him gently the way you would coax a flower to bloom."

***

Her garden is filled with its last season worth of flowers, bright red blossoms reaching for the ever-warming sunlight, though she has lost some of the heart she had to tend them. The man who is not her husband, however much she wishes or dreams it, buys the first seeds for her every spring, and there was once a raw joy in tending them, but it is becoming more difficult to find that inside herself.

The blooms match the colour of her son's hair as she watches him play in the back yard, digging in a bare patch of earth with one of her trowels he mimes planting flowers of his own.

His hair is getting long, she thinks, it will need to be cut soon, though she likes to card her fingers though it as he sleeps, likes the way that it frames his face.

As she watches he takes off at a run, head down, chasing something through the grass – a mouse, she thinks, the yard is teeming with them – then trips and falls. She wipes her hands quickly on her apron and hurries through the back yard into the sun to comfort him, but when he lifts his head at her approach his baby-soft cheeks are streaked only with grass, not tears. He holds out his hands, clasped tight together, a wriggling tail protruding from one side.

"Got it!" He declares.

“Be careful,” She chides him gently, “You don’t want to hurt it.”

Immediately his hands fly open, the mouse leaps free, vanishes into the grass. Her son gazes after it, eyes brimming with tears.

“Is okay?” He asks, “Is okay mama?”

***

There is no spring in heaven. The cherry blossoms bloom perpetually, it cannot even be said that there is a time rainier or colder than any other. The whole aspect of it is largely dull, unchanging.

But there is something to be said for being able to see the old with new eyes, and as Konzen watches Goku perform a strange little hop-dance through the high grass, fist clenched around a bouquet of daisies that will no doubt find its way onto Konzen's desk despite his best efforts to banish the unsightly, odd-smelling things, he thinks that Goku's joy is something he has never seen before, and that it is one thing he would be very happy not to have change in the least.

-End-


End file.
